1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to image processing including displaying a preview image of data including a plurality of pages, and more particularly, to an image processing apparatus, an image processing method, and a storage medium in which a computer program is stored, adapted to display a preview image of data including a plurality of pages.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, an increasing in popularity of digital cameras has brought about an increasing in use of image files, and use of image files is still increasing quickly. In many applications such as an electronic album, data including a plurality of image files is used. A great advance of performance and functionality of operating systems (OS) and application software has been made, and an improvement has been achieved in performance and functionality of previewing the content of files.
In previewing, it is common to display a preview image of data of a first page. In a particular type of data including a plurality of pages such as a document or a presentation file, a title is described in a first page thereof, and thus displaying the first page for previewing allows a user to easily recognize the content of the data.
However, in most cases of data of laid-out images, data does not have a cover sheet or a title is not described in a first page thereof. Therefore, displaying the first page for previewing does not allow a user to easily recognize the content of the data.
In a technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-145568, pages of a file are sequentially displayed for previewing so that a user is allowed to easily recognize the content of the file. In a technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-309995, an image added last to electronic album data is selected as a representative image and this representative image is displayed for previewing.
In the technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-145568 and also in the technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-309995, a preview image of a file is displayed so that a user is allowed to easily recognize the content of the file.
However, the technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-145568 has a problem that all pages are sequentially displayed for previewing regardless of whether an individual page is useful or not for a user to recognize the content of the file, and thus the user has to view a plurality of preview images that are displayed sequentially.
The technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-145568 has a problem that because the selection of a preview image is performed according to the method of producing electronic album data, i.e., a last image added to the electronic album is selected as the preview image, the selected preview image is not necessarily one that has typical characteristics of the album data.
In view of the above, the present invention provides an image processing apparatus capable of storing data including a plurality of image files each including a plurality of pages in a storage medium and capable of presenting a preview image that allows a user to easily recognize the content of the data stored in the storage medium.